Parents can only do best - No one in their right mind would condone a violent physical attack, let alone one that involves the use of a machete.

Parents can only do best - No one in their right mind would condone a violent physical attack, let alone one that involves the use of a machete.

But a great many parents will read the story told today by the Sargeant family and fully understand the frightening depths of their despair.

For the agony of being part of a family that falls apart in any way can cut to the very quick of one's being, especially when the breakdown leads to a child becoming estranged from those who love her.

Pity then Lloyd Sargeant, a man described as being of exemplary character, whose self-control vanished after he was forced to listen while drinkers in a pub shared lewd gossip about his daughter, Nadya.

At the time, she was 15 and involved with a man of 28 who had just been released from a five-year prison sentence for robbery and conspiracy to supply drugs. None of the above, of course, excuses the actions of Mr Sargeant, who attacked the one-time drug dealer with a machete.

Without a doubt too, he fully deserved the sentence passed on him by a Teesside judge who had the good sense not to send him to prison.

Today though, like tomorrow, Mr Sargeant and his wife Andrea will wonder what went wrong between them and Nadya. They will wonder what they could have done differently and ask themselves if anything they could have done might have made a difference.

Like parents everywhere, they know that the ties that bind a parent to a child cannot be servered, that the love they once shared can never be completely extinguished.

Yet all the time there will be the fear that this child they gave life to may never again shine her love in their direction.

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Doubt fuelled

The rise in petrol tax expected next month would put an extra &#xA3;200m to &#xA3;300m into the country's coffers this year, offsetting the bill for Tony Blair's Iraq adventure in the process.

The cost has been estimated to stand at some &#xA3;1bn for this year alone as the struggle continues to pacify and then rebuild the land Saddam Hussein did so much to destroy.

How much the Iraq War will finally cost in terms of lives and money, and what it will mean in opportunities lost at home for want of funding, no one can say.

But as the British people pay the price, there can be few left who do not regret that our Prime Minister could not find it in himself to have been more candid about why he wanted to lead us to war in the first place.